The last couple of months, we have seen an increase in accounts being registered for spamming purposes only. It took several hours to clean up both the posts and the accounts of those involved.

This forum is not meant to be an advertising place, so all spam messages will be deleted immediately and the user will be either banned or warned. Which option will apply will be decided by the board admin, based upon the overall contribution to the forum by the user.

To make it harder to register spam accounts, the following new rules apply as per now for new users:

All new users have to verify their e-mailaddress

All users with 5 or less posts are now in the 'Newly registered' group.

Newly registered users can only post in a new forum called 'User introduction' and they are required to open a topic here with only their username in the title, to introduce themselves.

Newly registered users no longer have the ability to post links in their posts.

With these new rules, spam accounts are restricted to 1 forum only, until they reached 5 posts. Then they can post in the other forums as well. Of course all the existing users can also post in the new forum.

Other actions to increase the amount of spam accounts are currently being reviewed, so more measurements might be implemented in the future.

first of all: Thank you very much for cleaning up the spam of the last months! I believe that was very hard and irritating work for you.
Second: Thank you for the new forum and the new rules. I hope with this measures the spam will stop now.
It was really no fun anymore to visit the forum in the last months, when almost every new posting was spam. So I hope visiting the forum will be more an enjoyment in the future as it was in the last months.
At the end another big Thank you to you!

"Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that.
Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that."

I have already found another way to deal with the spambots. I have now disabled the usage of links in posts from newly registered users. So you need to have at least 5 posts before you can add external links to posts.

Besides this, I have added some other measurements that I won't say too much about, but that work in the background.

I understand these measurements might also have a negative effect on legitimate new users, but fighting the massive flood of spam is a priority now. I will however evaluate the new measurements and make adjustments to them over time, so new users can (hopefully) enjoy more of the forum after they signed up.

I have made some changes to the measures taken. Limiting newly registered users to one forum didn't work as I planned for some reason, so they can now post in all public forums but their posts need moderator (or admin) approval.